


Dead Of Winter

by PaxVobis



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: 1970s, Alzheimer's Disease, Charles Doesn't Die, Charles Has Issues, Childhood Memories, Daddy Issues, Dysfunctional Family, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kidklok, Mommy Issues, Original Character Death(s), Parent Death, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 16:51:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10416684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: One-shot, another Dethmom.   Pre-Klok, Charles comforts his ailing mother following his sister's death, and reflects on death.Heavy headcanon, towards CFO having dealt with all this shit before Dethklok and having nothing to lose when that came around/Charles as the 'Dead Man' undertones.  Technically offshoot of Ars Moriendi.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [little_murmaider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_murmaider/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Ars Moriendi](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7668769) by [PaxVobis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis). 



Charles had gone to visit his mother in the hospital soon after the funeral, and the first thing the old woman had said, laid out in her bed all wilted and gray with her voice quivering in that tragic way, was: “So your sister finally topped herself.”  And Charles had frowned at her and said, “Mother,” sternly as he arranged the poppies he’d brought in a vase by her bedside, then stood over her bed with all the geniality of an executioner.

The woman twined her hands together before him, her fingers crooked and thin.  Too young to appear so, purpled where she’d injured them - how, thought Charles, on her water cup?  On the bedframe?  By lying on them?  God.  “Always did take more after your father,” she concluded, and Charles hummed dissatisfied, hiding his deep grief over having both of them taken so soon.

“So you, ah, always say.”

“Hmm?”  His mother had fixed him with one sharp, cruel hazel eye and Charles crossed his hands behind his back.

“Other people think differently,” he said mutedly, not really wishing to elaborate.  He knew what was coming, as his mother rolled her eyes and gave a dismissive wave, more of a flail, clumsy and useless in the air over her sheets.

“Oh, you don’t have to be a lawyer to take after your father.  Just a selfish cock.”

“Yes, you’ve told me.”

“And your sister far outstrips you there.”  The old bitch laughed until she coughed, hacking and thick.  Charles looked past her, he didn’t care to correct her.  Too difficult, to debate the nuances of taking one’s life with a woman on her deathbed.  If she weren’t such a stubborn woman, clinging onto life by her teeth, Charles was sure his mother would have begged for an assisted death as soon as the neurodegeneration had begun.  Not that he could do anything, but surely that was worse than death.

But no.  No.  Had to hang around, just to prove them wrong.

“Your, ah, cough’s getting worse,” he observed quietly, and his mother swallowed back the phlegm in her mouth.

“I’ll probably die of it.”

“… ah.  I should hope not.  It’s just a cough.”  Charles was greatly troubled by her talking like this, but there was no helping it.  After her stroke, her ability to determine what was appropriate to say or not had gone out the window - not that she’d had much filter anyway.  It was not terribly clear to him if it was the brain damage or just a new, divine level of not caring two shakes what others thought of her anymore.  Most likely both.

“Well, soon anyhow,” she croaked, and Charles gave a short huff.

“They gave you two years.  That’s not, ah… terrible.”  There were things you could do in two years.  Less if you were bedridden and demented, sure.  But perhaps there were things worth hanging around for.  He might have kids!  Charles thought of his love life and decided that was horribly unlikely, except by some freak virgin birth kind of deal.

But that wasn’t the point.

“And you’re going to stand over me like the damn reaper for all those two years, are you,” she croaked, staring at him, and Charles screwed up his frown a little and then abruptly sat in the chair at her bedside.  “Good boy,” she said, and held out her hand for him to hold and he took it obediently.  The skin was cold, dry like paper.  “How’s Bethy?”

Charles stared into space.  Well, it couldn’t have lasted long.  He could look forward to a lot of this.  “She’s dead, Mother.”

“Oh, finally killed herself has she.”

“Ah, that’s right.  Last week.”

“Takes after her father.”

“So you always say.”  He squeezed her hand gently, looking down at her.  “Funeral was, ah, nice.  Sunny.”

“Lovely.  That’s how she’d have wanted it.”  Looking at the old woman, her haunted eyes and her brown frizzy hair bolted with white, Charles found it beyond him how a mother couldn’t mourn for her daughter.  But then, that was the disease.

She’d mourned their father; he remembered it clear and seared into his mind, sitting at their big maple dining table with her doing the household accounts and himself a child on a chair with a book and coke bottle glasses.  He had been reading his father’s copy of _The Godfather_ , dog earred but still with that new print smell and something Offdensen Sr would have certainly forbade but he wasn't around and Charles' mother rarely paid any attention to the books he toted around. He could see the print before him, in a flurry remembered sneaking into the theaters a year later, underage, to see the violence, remembered Tony DiMarco on television broadcast live from Japan 1992, wheedling that solitary wail out of his guitar.  He would add, in coming years, overhearing the virtuoso Skwisgaar Skwigelf imitate him to a teenage guitarist in the rehearsal warehouse off East Scott, but for now, it was just good to know he hadn’t lost it yet.

He could see the page before him, but could not remember any of the words, barely any of the words from that book.  His mother sitting opposite him with her hair up and calculator and accounts and the phone.  A summer vacation.  Charles, when he wasn't competing in one of a dozen extra-curricular sports, had spent most of his idle time indoors, but now, reflecting, he felt that the 70s had been a sunnier time.  Through the window in the dining room he could see the juniper bushes, the dappled sunlight through the blinds, the halo it created on his mother’s curls.

The phone had rang, his mother had answered it, Charles eavesdropping and pretending to read his book.  Not that her conversations were ever that interesting, but he learned a lot.  For instance: his father was having an affair.  That was something he knew from the telephone calls - or more something Beth had told him (knowing instantly as she did, a teenage girl) and he had confirmed by listening.  His mother was very upset at having found out, and there had been an argument a night or so ago, and his father had not returned home since.  And Charles had taken the opportunity to raid his books.  Charles fancied, in his childish way, and in the way of a fourteen year old boy reading _The Godfather_ , that the other woman must be so beautiful and romantic, cut from silk, with bloody lips and dusky eyes in stark contrast to his mother’s severity and mess.  Of course it developed that she was just his secretary, but…

“ _I see.  Thank you for calling me, to tell me, ah…”_ said his mother, and that wasn’t the way people spoke on the phone so Charles raised his eyes and took in her frazzled face.  But he couldn’t work it out.

 _“Yes.  Thank you.  Goodbye.”_  She hung up the phone, put her hands over her face, and breathed, long and shaken, _“Fuck.”_

And that was the first time he had heard the word aloud, so sheltered he’d been raised.

She had stood up then, grabbed a handful of papers and stormed out, as if Charles had said something to set off her tempers but he had said nothing and felt so confused that he stood up after her and called out, _“Mom!”_  If she was upset, should he have run after her?  He knew in hindsight that if he had, she would have slapped him for certain.

_“Mom, what’s wrong?”_

And she, stopping in the door, shaking like the lines of her had been drawn wrong, sneered back, _“Your father’s dead,”_ though she refused to look back at him.

_“What?”_

_“Damn coward only went and hanged himself.”_

And she was gone, up the stairs, a door slamming behind her and a vase breaking shortly after.  Since she’d always been angry, even before, and in that way perhaps he did take more after her.  Now as he held her hand, staring absently into the space above her blankets, Charles considered that at least he had never snapped like she did.  Anger was better channeled, could be compressed, used.  Anger was just a tool.

His mother was saying something.  Dimly, he paid attention again, rubbing her cold hand with his thumb.  “You don’t really want to be like your father,” she was saying, a statement more than a question though he knew she wanted him to guarantee it.  A rare and nice sentiment.  On worse days, or more rightly evenings, she even mistook him for the dead man and he had to say her first name, _Judith_ , to get her to listen to him.  Beth had witnessed this, found it too hard to bear.  But she'd remembered their father better.  All Charles had was a child’s memory, strong hands, kind words - lies - then later, court decisions and crime novels.  An office corridor.  A recommendation from a judge.  An invite to a dinner party.  Not the same thing.  And now all that childhood lost with his sister, too.

“No,” he said definitively for the woman, and looked back at her face.  She was smiling at him.  Too young for this awful disease.

“You are your own man, Charlie.  Look at you, my little boy,” she said, her voice quavering and heavy with her cough, and Charles thought she might cry.  Oh, gee, that was always so hard to deal with, to talk down.  But she had more to say to him, things she had said over and over and over now:  “You are worth so much more than that son of a whore.”

“Mother, please, ah... language.”

She clutched onto his hand tightly, and Charles thought her nails might bite straight through his skin.  “I am so proud of you.”

“I, ah… know, Mom.”

He bowed his head, embarrassed, and only looked up when the old woman started to laugh, weirdly, madly, a crow-like cackle as she twisted his hand.  “But mind you, Charles, if you were the reaper, I’d stand straight up and shake your hand!” she declared, and he couldn’t help but smile at the dreadfulness of it all.  And two weeks later, in her 68th year and with the second stroke, she was dead.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're at all curious, all this CFO headcanon stuff is actually rooted in the Eels' album 'Electro Shock Blues', and this particular one is named after a song off that album.
> 
> Dedicated to my grandmother.


End file.
